A project was based on competition conducted by IIT Bombay which is E Yantra robotics competition. constructed a robot called Construction O Bot. The theme was based on disaster prone area. Due to natural calamities and landslides, there is huge loss of infrastructure and economy to the government as well as people living there. Such situations require immediate rebuilding and development of infrastructure, which demands huge manual force and more expenditure for labour charges. In such cases, efficiency of the work done decreases most of the time due to various factor such as casual nature of employee, ignorance, lack of stability, serious injuries to workers, etc. Hence, to reduce manual work, increase speed and efficiency of the construction work, there is need to introduce a construction bot which will work more efficiently to solve the problems by providing automotive solution. In the first stage for simulation, I used V- rep (Virtual robot experimentation platform) software. And a visual studio IDE for initial coding of algorithm and testing of robot over simulation environment. After successful testing on software, I implemented the hardware and programming was done in embedded C and in python.
The robot is constructed using new generation RISC based AT mega 2560 development board. A three-channel white line sensor for detection of path. Line sensors are used for sensing white line on dark surface or black line on light surface, based on output values from this sensor I developed a intelligent line following algorithm and shortest path algorithm. There were two algorithms one for white line following and another one for black line following. Another important part I constructed was a Robotic arm. I designed it first in a CATIA tool designing software then in the college laboratory I did acrylic cutting of hands by providing proper design input. The output hand was strong, light weight and teethed for proper grip. Then I powered it using two servo motors, one controlled the vertical motion of arm and another controlled the horizontal motion of the arm. I controlled those motors using AT mega controller and a motor driver L298N controlling voltage levels between controller and motors.
Robot powered by Li-Ion battery. The L298n heavy duty dual H bridge controller was also used to control the two dc motors which insured the commute of the robot. Hence finally robot was ready with amazing feature such as intelligent line following, shortest path algorithm and a robotic arm which was constructed from scratch.
My robot successfully passed all the rounds and ranked in top 9 participants in E-Yantra robotics competition 2019-2020 sponsored and organized by IIT Bombay.